Printing devices, referred to generally as printers herein for descriptive simplicity, are a nearly ubiquitous part of the modern world. Printers are used in every niche of society, from multi-national corporations and government entities, to elementary school students working on homework in the comfort of their homes. Among printer technologies, inkjet printers are one of the lower cost options, and therefore remain popular with consumers.
However, as users well know, replacement ink cartridges constitute a high, ongoing cost of ownership. Each cartridge has a limited usable life dictated primarily by its ink capacity. When no further ink can be usefully extracted, conventional ink cartridges must be disposed of and replaced. Periodically disposing of and replacing ink cartridges presents not only a substantial cost to the user, but also to the environment. Depleted ink cartridges are typically thrown away, after which their relatively non-degradable housings and chemical-containing inks end up in landfills. Further, producing replacement cartridges consumes a substantial amount of natural resources.
To reduce both the consumer cost and the environmental impact, numerous approaches have been developed to enable refilling of ink cartridges by the consumer or by a third-party. However, these efforts are both actively and passively discouraged by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), who make a handsome income selling replacement ink cartridges for their printers.
Firstly, OEMs typically do not design ink cartridges to include provisions for relatively simple, clean, and reliable ink replenishment by the consumer. Rather, the consumer must use third-party tools and methods that typically breach the integrity of the ink cartridge, and are frequently difficult and messy to perform.
Secondly, OEMS typically do not provide a means for the consumer to reset the electronic chipset that counts ink dispense signals from the printer and indicates when ink in the cartridge may be low and/or empty. Therefore, although a consumer may successfully refill an ink cartridge, the chipset will continue to signal that the ink is low and/or empty.
Even when a consumer is able to successfully refill an ink cartridge, the internal design of conventional ink cartridges limits the amount of ink that can be provided therein. For example, conventional ink cartridges typically include an internal ‘sponge’ designed to distribute ink relatively evenly throughout the internal body of the cartridge. Thus, as ink is dispensed from one area within the cartridge, the dispensed ink is replaced by ink wicked through the sponge from another area of the cartridge body. However, this design has two cartridge-life-shortening deficiencies.
Firstly, the sponge itself consumes space within the cartridge body, thus reducing the amount of ink that can be contained therein. Secondly, when the amount of ink in the cartridge drops below the wicking capacity of the sponge, no further internal ink transfer occurs, despite the fact that ink remains in the cartridge. Thus, ink otherwise available for printing is wasted.
Further still, most ink cartridges provide for only a single mode of use. For example, conventional ink cartridges are designed to be used once and then discarded. Refillable ink cartridges produced by some third-party companies enable reuse, but still suffer from numerous problems, such as those inherent from inclusion of a sponge therein (as discussed above). Further still, neither conventional cartridges nor refillable cartridges are configured for use with a Continuous Ink Supply System (CISS).
Thus, existing ink cartridges, and indeed the structure of the OEM ink cartridge industry, entails elevated costs to consumers, and presents a tangible environmental burden. Thus far, incremental attempts fail to significantly alleviate either or both of these problems.